Department of HistoryCopyright (c) 2014 Carnegie Mellon University All rights reserved.http://repository.cmu.edu/history
Recent documents in Department of Historyen-usMon, 14 Jul 2014 18:53:30 PDT3600Solidarity and Accountability: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rightshttp://repository.cmu.edu/history/5
http://repository.cmu.edu/history/5Wed, 18 Dec 2013 11:51:18 PST
in July of 1999, a small nonprofit organization based in Buenos Aires brought a case against the state of Argentina in front of the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), part of the Organization of American States.1 Comprised of family members of victims from the 1994 bombing of a local Jewish center, the group Memoria Activa, or Active Memory, accused the Argentine government of violating their human rights to justice and to the protection of their lives and physical integrity, for failing to prevent the attack or to bring its perpetrators to trial. Memoria Activa also expressed their demand for justice and full rights to security by holding weekly events in the public plaza facing the Justice Building (Palacio de Justicia). In doing so, they insisted that they were exercising their rights and performing their duties as citizens, asserting what the state’s role should be, and demanding that it meet its obligations. At the same time and also in Argentina, spiraling unemployment numbers brought about the emergence of the recuperated businesses movement. Driven in part by more than 5,000 factory business closures during the second half of the 1990s, the movement was formed by former employees of these bankrupt factories and businesses, who banded together as workers’ cooperatives and re-created the jobs that had just disappeared. In fighting for legal tenancy of the establishments they had put back into production, cooperative members demanded that the state give primacy to their human right to the means to earn a living and fulfill its role in protecting their rights as citizens to meaningful access to dignified work.
]]>
Karen Ann FaulkStitching curtains, grinding plastic: The transformation of workers and things in Buenos Aireshttp://repository.cmu.edu/history/4
http://repository.cmu.edu/history/4Wed, 18 Dec 2013 11:51:16 PST
More than a decade has now passed since Argentina gained international notoriety for defaulting on its crushing foreign debt. The convertibility plan, which had pegged the peso to the dollar at a 1-1 rate since 1991, collapsed in December of 2001 under the weight of its own non-sustainability. Skyrocketing unemployment and widespread poverty led to massive street protests on the 19th and 20th of that month, bringing an end to President De la Rúa’s Alianza government and, eventually, to the neoliberal economic model that it had inherited. In the years that followed, the country flourished, reducing social inequity and maintaining overall growth even during the ‘global’ economic crises that engulfed the United States and Europe a few years later. The case of Argentina has justly sparked renewed debate, particularly within Latin America, about the nature of the state and the feasibility of neoliberal economics. Questions as to the proper role of political direction in guiding economic policy have once again taken centre stage. Furthermore, the massive popular mobilization that spelled the ultimate end of neoliberalism’s legitimacy in Argentina is reflected in similar mobilizations within the Global North, as financial speculation and deregulation become increasingly identified as responsible for problems with the current economic system and its effects on those living within it. The protests that brought about such drastic change in Argentina were the product of a general dissatisfaction and frustration with political representatives and the failure of democracy to allow citizens the right of choice concerning economic policy. Yet at this critical juncture, it is worth noting that the protests were also fundamentally concerned with ideas of work, legality, moral obligation, and human dignity. Embedded in the many acts of protest and resistance that surrounded the Argentine crisis and its aftermath were discursive struggles over the nature of social life and the relationship of the state to society.
]]>
Karen Ann FaulkIf They Touch One of Us, They Touch All of Us: Cooperativism as a Counterlogic to Neoliberal Capitalismhttp://repository.cmu.edu/history/3
http://repository.cmu.edu/history/3Fri, 06 Dec 2013 13:36:45 PST
Through an ethnographic examination of the BAUEN, a workers' cooperative and part of the recuperated businesses movement, this article considers the emergence of a logic of cooperativism in Argentina in recent years. In analyzing this idea of cooperativism, I distinguish three different but interrelated aspects: formal cooperativism, affective cooperativism or compañerismo, and community outreach and support. I show how this logic of cooperativism relies upon a discourse of corruption to delegitimize the cultural conceptions implicit in neoliberalism as applied in Argentina and opens a space for the emergence of new and revitalized conceptions of work and the citizen.
]]>
Karen Ann FaulkWriting as a Magical Act: Tracing Histories of Violence and Cocaine in Colombiahttp://repository.cmu.edu/history/2
http://repository.cmu.edu/history/2Fri, 06 Dec 2013 13:36:42 PST
Two of Michael Taussig’s most recent books, My Cocaine Museum and Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia, compellingly evoke life and landscape in the Valle del Cauca region of Colombia. They provide an insightful if bleak picture of the inner workings of terror and violence. Each experiments with a different form of writing to engage with questions of the state, history, power, and narration. Synthesizing concerns elaborated in Taussig’s earlier works, these books are innovative in their style and sophisticated in their analytic content.
]]>
Karen Ann FaulkIn the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentinahttp://repository.cmu.edu/history/1
http://repository.cmu.edu/history/1Fri, 06 Dec 2013 13:36:39 PST
Understanding the various meanings given to human and citizenship rights in Argentina is an important task, particularly so given the nation's prominence in global discussions. An "exporter" of tactics, ideas, and experts, Argentina has become a site of innovation in the field of human rights. This book investigates two prominent Buenos Aires protest organizations—Memoria Activa and the BAUEN workers' cooperative—to consider how each has framed its demands within a language of rights.

Fundamentally, this book is concerned with the complex interrelationship between the discourse of human rights and the neoliberal project. In exploring the way in which "rights talk" is used and adapted locally by various activist groups, the book looks at the mutually formative and contentious interactions between ideas of human rights, rights of citizenship, and the concrete and envisioned social relationships that form the basis for social activism in the wake of neoliberalism.